One good side-effect of contemporary politics is that a more sober look at the merits and demerits of the US Founders’ legacy is possible again. (Of course, here at CrookedTimber we pride ourselves on our sobriety in such matters; it helps many of us reside in distant shores.) The current US President has contempt for reverence toward the past; and his opponents have no time for reflection.
One defect in the US Founders’ constitution is that while they are very concerned with developing mechanisms against what Machiavelli and his followers called ‘corruption’ — a word frequently used in the Federalist Papers —, but that it leaves too little room for what Machiavelli and his followers would have called ‘renewal’ (or ‘renovation’)—a word almost wholly absent from the Federalist Papers. In the Machiavellian sense, corruption is not just about illegal and legalized bribery, but also and even more about the bending of the rules such that when they function properly the public good is structurally undermined. There is a glimpse of awareness of this lacuna to be found in the historiographic debate(s) over the status of Lincoln as a so-called ‘refounder’ of the constitution, despite the fact that the US civil war conclusively indicates its failure.
Yet, as Machiavelli notes, “those [republics and religions] are best organized and have longest life that through their institutions can often renew themselves or that by some accident outside their organization come to such renewal.” Discourses on Livy (hereafter Discourses; 3.1), translated by Allan Gilbert (Chief Works, Vol. 1) p. 419. So, if you take what one may call, ‘Machiavellian social theory,’ seriously it is not an irrelevant topic.
One sign that corruption in the Machiavellian sense is very advanced is that the existing institutions that are supposed to renew a republic fail to do so. And one discovers this empirically, alas, in all the wrong ways: namely through catastrophic failure. An especially notable recent example of this can be found if we reflect on the then Senate Republican leader’s reasoning to explain his stance toward impeachment on 13 February 2021:
Leaving aside the merits of the Senator’s understanding of the purpose of intra-governmental safety-valves, it turns out that the criminal justice system and civil litigation were already fatally corrupted. I suspect Senator McConnell was as blinded to this fact as most inside the Beltway. It’s a peculiar fact that the very people who know a system’s limitations best are often the most ardent institutionalists.
Because the political and conceptual frame of reference of the contemporary left and contemporary right is so shaped by the twentieth century and its fondness for monocausal roads to totalitarianism, ‘corruption’ seems quaint compared to fascism, Stalinism, national-socialism, etc. The important thing about corruption, then, is that its sources are not monocausal. (So, it’s not just the absence of a scary enemy, or the pernicious role of wealth in the political and criminal justice system, or rent-seeking, or the abolition of the draft, the open primaries, the destruction of The Glass–Steagall act, the generous reduction of top marginal tax rates of the income tax, the socialization of risk among the 1% while keeping the rewards, the perversion of free speech in Citizens United, [and introduce all your pet theories] etc.) The dispositions and practices that uphold a well-functioning constitutional order are multifaceted and so usually a source of robust-ness; but also sensitive to the particularities of the polity.
But because the US constitution deliberately makes amendment difficult and de facto presupposes either a broad consensus among the political class or among the citizens (or both) to make it possible, it actually makes what we might call ongoing structural renewal extra difficult. This status quo bias has many virtues, but it also means that when it most needs actual renewal it will be least likely to occur. In particular, if such ongoing renewal is not of interest to the executive branch it seems dead upon arrival.
In fact, what’s crucial about ages of advanced corruption is that even the most well-intended technocratic tinkering (single transferable vote, sortition, fact-checking, political quotas, proportional representation, etc.) almost comically misses the mark. Even if they bring some of the benefits their advocates promise (I am myself a fan of proportional representation), for their proper functioning they presuppose an uncorrupted regime.
I don’t mean to suggest that Machiavelli himself provides much guidance on how to regulate corruption prevention and subsequent renewal. In order to block corruption, his main suggestion that is compatible with modern liberal democracy is to set up mechanisms for regular accountability of officeholders not just to voters, but also to other office holders. Most of his other suggestions involve public offices that regulate the ambition and pride of public officeholders and ambitious citizens—that route was rejected a long time ago (although loyalty oaths might come back into fashion for the wrong reasons).*
So, when a state of corruption has arrived one must hope on Machiavelli’s view that one is visited by charismatic political leaders, who call the people back to its former ways (and so manage to introduce needed reforms), although such calling back may involve institutional and cultural innovation. But, alas, this is most likely to work after, say, military defeat (a “blow from outside” (p. 420)).
The problem here is that such a political leader must in the context of a corrupt polity, itself engage in modes of activity that are legally and morally dubious at best, and awful in practice (as reflection on all ‘Enlightened dictators’ teach us). This is not a bug, but a feature of the theory of renewal. And, unfortunately, recognition of this fact means that even when there is consensus on the reality that ‘we’ find ourselves in a corrupt state, a political leader’s decisive actions may be interpreted as either a means to overcome corruption (that’s the arc from “the flight 93 election” to the present on the political right) or an instrument of reinforcing it.
From the vantage point of Machiavellian social theory, the re-election of Trump, who has given the keys to the Treasury and its data-management to Musk, is evidence of the height of corruption; whereas for (let’s call them what they are) the accelerationists this is the means toward renewal. The US polity has reached that very duck-rabbit point (itself a sign of corruption).
This week-end’s abrupt attempt, through pre-emptive tariff changes, to reshape the global environment to new political reality is the beginning of the test to what degree the US can ignore the reactions of the rest of the world (and stack the deck toward a certain kind of new, Mercantile regime) as its struggles internally over its future. Your guess is as good as mine in these matters, but I strongly suspect that none of the rules of thumb and maxims about how the world really works that policymakers, commentators, global businesses, NGOs, and academics have relied upon for, say, the last thirty to sixty years, are going to be very robust.
- A modestly revised version of this post first appeared (here) at DigressionsNimpressions.
*In fact, because modern liberal democracies refuse to impose terror on their populations, one may well suspect that Machiavelli is wholly irrelevant for our predicament. For, the function of renewal for Machiavelli is:
By revising the government they meant inspiring such terror and such fear in the people as they had inspired on first taking charge, for at that time they punished those who, according to that kind of government, had done wrong. When the memory of such punishment disappears, men take courage to attempt innovations and to speak evil; therefore it is necessary to provide against them by moving the government back toward its beginnings. (421; emphasis added)
{ 28 comments }
MisterMr 02.04.25 at 12:15 pm
I have two unrelated points:
The first point is that M, though modern from some points of view, was still a man of 1500, so on the one hand he didn’t have a moral value of “democracy” similar to ours, and on the other had a rather distorted concept of history (he more or less treats Romulus as an historical character).
This second, “mythological” aspect of his view merge with the first to create a somewhat conservative “good father” theory of politics:
He more or less assumes that polities are created by a strong leader who, in some sense, is a good, though father who creates the laws (like Draco or Lycurgus), and then things start to degenerate from there.
So his theory of “corruption” has the disadvantage that, while M doesn’t want to bew a moralist, “corruption” is defined implicitly against this conservative though father ideology.
The second is that Trump policies are quit high risk, short term policies, so it is quite likely to be winning in the short term, but losing long term: e.g. being though VS european countries (or other allies/vassal states) is going to partially work in the short term when EU countries do not know how to react, but will sour the relationship with the vassal/allies so that, at some point in say 2035, EU countries will have an independent military that they will use in a way antagonistic to the USA, or similar.
But Trump will not be there in 2035, and will not really be blamed for this, hence the problems of his brand of politics.
So even the “shock from the outside”, if this will happen, will happen much later.
SamChevre 02.04.25 at 4:07 pm
I think that the forms of terror may have changed, but that Machiavelli remains accurate; By revising the government they meant inspiring such terror and such fear in the people as they had inspired on first taking charge, for at that time they punished those who, according to that kind of government, had done wrong.
The prosecution of Kim Davis would be a good modern example of a government defining wrong-doing (in an innovative and anti-democratic way) and then aggressively punishing those who tried to act on previously-settled understandings of the law.
Aardvark Cheeselog 02.04.25 at 5:25 pm
Machiavelli could be wrong about what makes an “uncorrupted” (or maybe “pre-corruption”) society (it’s tolerably obvious from the history of Europe after Machiavelli, that terror alone is not the incentive for lawfulness and good citizenship) while also being broadly correct in most of the rest of his thinking about renewal or renovation.
Aardvark Cheeselog 02.04.25 at 5:30 pm
Also what SamChevre @2 said: “terror” does not have to involve the threat of fleets of Black Marias rolling out every night to arrest the next wave of victims. “Terror” could just be the realization that not going along with the clearly-wrong thing being demanded of you could mean the end of your career, the loss of your house, etc.
Anybody who ever got busted after buying a quarter ounce of pot from a friend, and had the cops demand to know where it came from on pain of enhanced punishment if they refused to talk, can call “bullshit” on the claim that “modern liberal democracies refuse to impose terror on their populations.”
steven t johnson 02.04.25 at 5:38 pm
It would be useful to the understanding I think to distinguish the Founders, the men (and ignored women) who made the American Revolution, and the Framers of the Constitution. It’s like conflating the English Civil War (once occasionally called the Puritan Revolution) and the “Glorious” Revolution. (Yes, those are scare quotes.) Or in conflating the Committee of Public Safety and the Directory.
Mike Furlan 02.04.25 at 6:32 pm
As Frank Wilhoit has pointed out, the problem is bottom up.
I think Senator McConnell’s failure was assuming that the electorate would do what he did not have the courage to do and end Trump’s political future. Not that the institutions would hold.
What we can expect from a voting population that has had their brains marinated in the Facebook, YouTube and TikTok algorithms is disturbing.
bexley 02.04.25 at 7:00 pm
” I suspect Senator McConnell was as blinded to this fact as most inside the Beltway. It’s a peculiar fact that the very people who know a system’s limitations best are often the most ardent institutionalists.”
This is rather more charitable to him than I would be. McConnell’s career has shown he is highly aware of the system’s limitations and exploiting them to achieve his aims. I doubt he was blinded to anything here.
JPL 02.04.25 at 11:23 pm
From the OP:
“In the Machiavellian sense, corruption is not just about illegal and legalized bribery, but also and even more about the bending of the rules such that when they function properly the public good is structurally undermined. ”
There seems to be, possibly, an unclarity in the expression here. In trying to understand your intended message I formulated the following alternative expression, which, although it seems a little convoluted, maybe gets at what you were trying to express. (Tell me if I’m wrong, in which case my apologies.) “In the Machiavellian sense the term ‘corruption’ refers to a situation where the original rules of governance (e.g., in a constitution), which were drafted with the aim of ensuring the public good, are bent, through careless application, into rules different from the original ones (and for which the statements of these now modified rules would have to be different), that, functioning as they are now stated, have lost contact with the original aim, and end up structurally undermining the public good.” (And this now leaves open an approach to elaborating on Machiavelli’s notion of ‘renewal’.)
(Also, the first sentence of the second paragraph is not coherent as expressed. Perhaps, “… Papers– their focus on the problem of corruption leaves too little room for attention to what Machiavelli … called ‘renewal’….”) I ask about these possible clarifications because I think you raise important question about the relations between the notions of ‘corruption’, and ‘seriousness’, the phenomena of crankery and crackpottery (e.g., Musk and Vought, among others), and approaches to intellectual engagement, such as “scheming” (to get what you want, e.g., the billionaires and the Republican Party, even traditionally), “daydreaming” (e.g., Trump), as opposed to following the best practices of truth-seeking and causal analysis as is standard in the various fields of expertise, which seems to be effectively absent in the people around Trump. And I would like the readers to appreciate your insights. Between the public and this government there doesn’t seem to be even the usual shared sense of “decency” that can be appealed to, or “good faith” that can be assumed.
J-D 02.05.25 at 12:17 am
This is a flagrant distortion. It was never a settled understanding of the law that somebody could refuse to comply with a court order because it wasn’t what God wanted, and there was nothing either innovative or anti-democratic about treating this as a contempt of court. I admit that I don’t know enough about the usual punishments for contempt of court to opine about whether five days in jail was ‘aggressive’.
As a general observation this is true, but it has no specific applicability to the case cited by SamChevre. Some possibility that Kim Davis might lose her job over the issue was present in the background, but how much chance there was that this might have happened is difficult to assess: it doesn’t seem to me that there was ever much chance that she would lose her job in any way except the way she actually did eventually lose her job, which was by losing an election. Do you really want to extend the concept of ‘terror’ to include the effect on an elected official of the possibility that they might be defeated for re-election?
John Q 02.05.25 at 3:12 am
“none of the rules of thumb and maxims about how the world really works that policymakers, commentators, global businesses, NGOs, and academics have relied upon for, say, the last thirty to sixty years, are going to be very robust.”
I’d push that back to eighty years, and in some respects beyond.
John Q 02.05.25 at 3:12 am
It’s important to observe that this outcome was the result of a specific choice made by a plurality of US voters (along with a large group of abstainers) last November. The Democrats, while problematic in all sorts of ways offered a more-or-less stable democracy. The voters, with the evidence of the attempted coup in 2021 before them, voted for fascism. Whether this will produce collapse or a very unappealing kind of renewal remains to be seen. But there is no going back to US democracy as we have understood it until now.
The fact that a democratic majority could choose to end democracy has been understood as a theoretical possibility until now. But the typical pattern has been either a government with minority support establishing a dictatorship (Hitler) or an initially moderate government gradually eroding democracy (Orban). At least in these cases, a subsequent democratic renewal can begin by claiming that the previous regime never had democratic legitimacy
KT2 02.05.25 at 3:36 am
JQ, always appreciate you not mincing words.
The new C word – Coup.
Hasn’t Doge-e-boy left Obban in the dust qlready, bar the law suits shouting?
“This is what a coup looks like in 2025”
From…
“The Media Is Missing the Story: Elon Musk Is Staging a Coup
“As the world’s richest man seizes control of government agencies, mainstream outlets are treating it like standard political news”
https://www.readtpa.com/p/the-media-is-missing-the-story-elon
LFC 02.05.25 at 5:57 am
I don’t completely share the OP’s judgment that the criminal justice system is “fatally corrupted.” Trump was indicted in the federal Jan. 6 case, which Jack Smith reframed to take account of the SCOTUS pres. immunity decision. The case would have continued, w/ a result admittedly hard to predict, had Trump not won the election (a fact extrinsic to the criminal justice system). He was convicted of felony counts in the NY payoff-to-the-porn-star case, and the judge gave him a null sentence (conditional discharge, if I recall the term correctly), again mostly b/c he won the election.
The courts should not be seen as saviors, for sure, but they can probably be expected to block the most obviously egregious and unconstitutional of Trump’s moves, e.g. the effort to abolish birthright citizenship. Some of the immigration moves, such as the announced withdrawal of temporary protected status from 350,000 Venezuelans or the elimination of the app that allowed people to schedule asylum appointments, may also be reversed by the courts. Trump won in SCOTUS in Dobbs and the immunity decision, among others, but even w the right-wing majority his admin’s first-term “win rate” at SCOTUS was not high. See:
https://coreyrobin.com/2025/01/30/will-the-courts-check-trump/
This is one difference, as of now, between the U.S. and Hungarian cases. In Hungary, Orban, as I understand it, severely compromised the independent judiciary. That has not quite happened in the U.S. as yet, despite the ideological complexion of SCOTUS (and certain lower courts). Of course, it remains to be seen exactly how things in this sphere will unfold.
JPL 02.05.25 at 6:29 am
JQ:
“The fact that a democratic majority could choose to end democracy has been understood as a theoretical possibility until now.”
I would disagree with the presupposed claim that (paraphrasing) what the democratic majority did in the recent election was “choose to end democracy”. I don’t think it would be correct to say that such a claim accurately describes a fact. It’s difficult to interpret the results of elections in terms of what people chose to do. There were similar problems with the interpretation of the Brexit result, esp for what it meant about what the government should do. The voters chose to vote for the Republican Party and Trump, but their reasons for voting, insofar as they knew what they were, varied greatly, and especially, their understanding of the principles of governance and the terminology used to describe it varied. I don’t think most voters have a clear or uniform understanding of what exactly the term ‘democracy’ is supposed to describe or refer to when applied to systems of government. E.g., they might think of it as “the people determine who wins the election by whoever gets the most votes”, as if it is just the popular poll aspect, and they just want to make sure their group always wins. Most people had more concrete problems in mind, and of course they were all mistaken in one way or another. Probably nobody said, “Instead of the rule of law principle and the good Samaritan principle, let’s just allow the law of the jungle to prevail”. (That, of course, the opening up, totally in contradiction to the spirit and text of the Constitution (and thus corrupt) of the possibility of the combination of power and bloodthirstiness, that was left to the SCOTUS to decide.) Why the people who voted that way did so remains a big mystery.
So absolutely, I think that renewal is a possibility as well as a necessity. The way the Constitution is written, the expressions often leave loopholes for corrupt interpretations, fail to notice conventional cultural assumptions that violate the spirit of a rule statement and need to be explicitly addressed, fail to change with the evolution of the language, and still fail to account for the possibility that the people who gain power are not “decent people”, but rather have corrupt intent. Loss of shared positive values and ideals is probably the most difficult aspect to get back. But it’s not just up to the political figures to get back on the right track; it’s time for the poets, the clergy (I’m thinking of South Africa and Mariann Budde), and the arts in general, including shared cultural experiences. You need a different way of looking at things.
Tm 02.05.25 at 9:24 am
JQ: “But the typical pattern has been either a government with minority support establishing a dictatorship (Hitler)”
Hitler did not have majority support in 1933 but anti-Republican parties did receive a clear majority of the votes (59%) while the “Weimar coalition” of prodemocratic parties was fatally weakened. The republic was relatively easy to kill off because a majority of voters didn’t care for it. I’m not sure that the US situation isn’t similar. And of course, Weimar era voters had far better reasons to be dissatisified with their republic than US voters today have (or for that matter Western European voters, many of whom are willing to turn against the system that gave them a historically unprecedented 80 year perdiod of peace and prosperity).
engels 02.05.25 at 11:54 am
Weimar era voters had far better reasons to be dissatisified with their republic than US voters today have
I might choose Weimar’s cultural scene over social media, Amazon Prime and the “golden age of television” but maybe that’s just me.
MisterMr 02.05.25 at 2:10 pm
@TM 15
“historically unprecedented 80 year perdiod of peace and prosperity”
While this is true, in Italy for example we have stagnation or declining incomes since the early 90s, and many social programs have been gutted in various way (importantly, retirement age has been incresed while retirement payments have been lowered), at various moments by the “center left”.
So if you don’t look at the long course of history, but just at the last 40 years or so (that is probably the timeframe most people have), you will see things getting worse and worse.
Furthermore, practically capitalism needs continuous growth to stay stable (because capitalists need a continuous incentive to invest). In the last 30 years or so, at least in western developed countries this didn’t happen (in Italy it didn’t happen at all, in other places there was growth but not enough); it is arguable that this continuous growth cannot happen continuously but only in some peculiar moments (like the postwar period).
This low-growth situation is a problem because: people perceive their situation as stagnant or worse, economically there is a need for growth in financial assets and an increase in rents, that in the long term means greater distance between the richj and the poor, and even the rich will feel that they are going nowhere.
I personally do not have a great solution VS this low-growth problem, however it is obvious that this creates a lot of dissatisfaction everywhere.
In pre-capitalist societies growth was lower, but then pre-capitalist societies sucked and the son of the poor farmer was supposed to be a poor farmer, or in the late middle ages/early modern period he could become a mercenary in one of the many wars that they had every other week, so that is not really comparable to our society.
Or to put things in a different way: the economy is not a zero sum game but if it becomes a zero-sum or negative sum game, people will be generally pissed (in reasonable and unreasonable directions).
bekabot 02.05.25 at 5:49 pm
“Probably nobody said, ‘Instead of the rule of law principle and the good Samaritan principle, let’s just allow the law of the jungle to prevail’.”
Correction: nobody said “let’s just let the law of the jungle prevail” — first, because they probably didn’t have quite enough guts, and second and more importantly, because they didn’t need to. Nobody had to say anything, all they had to do was make indeterminate noises with their mouths, which is exactly what they did. All they had to do was seed the ground properly so that the right kinds of plants would sprout up, then sit on their hands and not get in the way. (Mitch McConnell is a master of this strategy.) If you farm a jungle the way you’d farm potatoes you’ll end up with a fine impassable tangle which will impose its own law. Then, voilà, you’ve instituted the law of the jungle — just as you planned and desired.
bekabot 02.05.25 at 6:09 pm
Added: sorry about the misuse of HTML. Not intentional.
engels 02.05.25 at 6:17 pm
historically unprecedented 80 year perdiod of peace and prosperity
Statements like this make you wonder if US liberals live on a different planet to the rest of us, one in which Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Chile, Indonesia, Vietnam and Palestine (to name a few) don’t appear,
steven t johnson 02.05.25 at 7:32 pm
@15 does a lot of work with the concept of “anti-Republican,” doesn’t it?
LFC 02.05.25 at 9:16 pm
engels @20
Statements like this make you wonder if US liberals live on a different planet to the rest of us
The statement in question was not made by a “US liberal,” but by a commenter (namely, Tm) who has written that he lives in Switzerland (and is not an American, though he has spent time in the U.S.).
JPL 02.05.25 at 10:10 pm
bekabot@18:
Thanks for responding to something that I wrote, but there seems to be a problem with the relation of reference in your reply which I just have to clarify. When I said “nobody” I was intending to refer to the voters who voted for Trump, not Republican politicians. (Yes, philosophers, pace Wittgenstein, I intended the word “nobody” to be a referring expression, with the real world Trump voters, not the Republican politicians, as the referent. I perhaps should have said, “Probably nobody among the Trump voters said ….”.) The intended import of the following parenthetical sentence was to suggest that the voters didn’t need to vote specifically with that reason because the Supreme Court had already accomplished that objective. In your alternative “they” seems to have an anaphoric relation to the word “nobody” in the preceding (first) clause, but it (the pronoun “they”) seems to be referring to Republican politicians rather than the Trump voters. However, I would agree wholeheartedly with what your alternative says, that by their irresponsible inaction Republican politicians in effect enabled (or further enabled) the opening of the possibility for the law of the jungle to prevail. Does that make a difference for you? (Sorry about the bit of grammatical wonkery; I agree with your sentiment.)
nastywoman 02.06.25 at 7:05 am
@I might choose Weimar’s cultural scene over social media, Amazon Prime and the “golden age of television” but maybe that’s just me.
Statements like this make you wonder if ‘Engels’ live on a different planet to the rest of us, who are aware about the political violence from the fall of the German Empire and the rise of the Republic through the German Revolution of 1918–1919, until the rise of the Nazi Party to power with 1933 elections and the proclamation of the Enabling Act of 1933 that fully broke down all opposition. The violence was characterised by assassinations and by confrontations between right-wing groups such as the Freikorps (sometimes in collusion with the state), and left-wing organisations such as the Communist Party of Germany.[1]
Between 1919 and 1922, there were at least 354 politically-motivated murders by right-wing extremists, primarily Freikorps, and a minimum of 22 murders by left-wing extremists. Compared to right-wing murders, left-wing motivated murders were criminally prosecuted much more frequently and received significantly harsher sentencing (Ten executions, three life sentences, and 249 total years of imprisonment compared to one life sentence and 90 total years of imprisonment).
That’s why we choose Germany’s or let’s say Europe’s current cultural scene WAY over
even the cultural scene of Weimar.
(commenting from the German-Swiss Border)
nastywoman 02.06.25 at 7:20 am
and about Italy and:
@’So if you don’t look at the long course of history, but just at the last 40 years or so (that is probably the timeframe most people have), you will see things getting worse and worse’.
Forty years ago the standard of living in Italy was still way below the standard of living in Germany – even as the Italian Gastarbeiter of the 50th and 60th had made a huge success in Germany and could send a lot of money back to their homeland.
And now Germans often have to look full of envy to their booming Italian vacations spots
where their Italian friends can retire earlier and with far more ‘Rente’ than in Germany.
Aardvark Cheeselog 02.06.25 at 2:56 pm
> Statements like this make you wonder if US liberals live on a different planet to the rest of us
Discussions at first-world-centric philosophy blogs are typically first-world-centric.
nastywoman 02.07.25 at 9:31 am
‘but I strongly suspect that none of the rules of thumb and maxims about how the world really works that policymakers, commentators, global businesses, NGOs, and academics have relied upon for, say, the last thirty to sixty years, are going to be very robust’.
There is nothing more ‘robust’ than the Bell on Wall Street.
(as ‘sad’ it might be)
nonrenormalizable 02.07.25 at 3:12 pm
Kevin Elliot had a recent thread up on BlueSky about how the trend in US politics has been away from technocratic or pluralistic politics towards friend-enemy politics — or at least, it has been so on the right/Republican side.
Unfortunately, as the OP notes, most of the liberal/Democratic opposition to MAGA still seem to want to engage in technocratic or pluralistic solutions to the acute crisis and the systemic issues that produced it, whereas (as distasteful as it seems) engaging in friend-enemy politics may be the only way for them to meaningfully exert what power remains.
The point is that, in the “game” of politics, allowing one side to engage in corruption and institution destruction with little or no expense politically, while simultaneously pledging to uphold norms and standards that are simply annihilated by those exerting their will, is a road to irrelevancy and annihilation.
It’s only by engaging in friend-enemy style rhetoric and behavior that one forces the other side (and the watching populace) to understand that the old norms and institutions were in place as compromises between political factions in order to guarantee a level of stability that allows for long-term prosperity.
As the OP points out, Machiavelli realized that this is a lesson that unfortunately may need to be learned through violent (or at least chaotic) experience.
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